Not Just Bike's Jason Slaughter's visit to Montreal, the "Best City* in North America"
On the 21 December of 2023, Not Just Bike's Jason Slaughter published a You Tube video on Montreal entitled "I Visited the Best* City in North America". Not Just Bikes is my favorite You Tube channel and I always look forward to seeing new content from Jason. When I saw that he had made an episode on Montreal I felt I had to make a Blog Post commenting on what he said about this city.
First thing I noted was that, at 51 minutes, this is the longest NJB episode ever made. If that was not enough he actually posted two videos on the same day about this city. The second, at 41 minutes, is entitled "What is it REALLY Like to Cycle in Montreal" and may only be available on nebula.tv
These videos offer way more information than is typically presented in the NJB series and I think that Jason felt that Montreal deserved an in depth analysis of its on going attempt to build a new form of urban-ism within a North American context. The first video starts in a typical fashion, giving the highlights of the city, but half way through he stops and gives some perspective. In addition to having some of the best areas for cycling, Montreal has some of the worst, and often the two are side by side.
I thought the criticisms that Jason Slaughter listed towards the end of the video were very perceptive. The number of trains per day to Toronto, the location of metro stations in car dominated environments, the pumping of vehicles into Montreal's downtown core by expressways that actually traverse the core, the lack of protected bike lanes on major very wide streets such as Sherbrooke, Rene Levesque, etc, etc.
ReplyDeleteMontreal is moving in the right direction but still has a long way to go.
hoorah
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